抄録
This paper aims at forecasting the future course of East Asian Integration and evaluating its impact on Japanese agriculture.
For that purpose, we review the bilateral economic partnership agreements (EPAs) and regional EPAs in East Asia to elucidate the basic factors which promote or impede the negotiation of EPA. Based on the review, we hypothesize that the following basic factors are very important determinants for agreement: economic scale of countries concerned, difference in industrialization between the two countries, transportation cost between the two countries, the number of partner countries who have already made agreements of EPA, political weight of government on interest groups, the difference in government qualities between the two countries, and south-south agreement.
As a next step, we make an econometric analysis to test the hypotheses. The results of estimation show that the difference in industrialization between the two countries, political weight of government on interest groups, the difference in government qualities between two countries, and south-south agreement have negative impacts on EPA agreements, while the number of partner countries who have already made agreements of EPA has a positive impact.
From the investigation mentioned above, we conclude that the East Asian Integration will progress gradually as politically sensitive sectors will be excluded from free trade agreement and that its direct impact on Japanese agriculture will be minor though the indirect impact through globalization might be much more serious.
